Evolution: What The Fossils Say And Why it Matters

tags: Evolution: What The Fossils Say And Why it Matters, fossils, dinosaurs, creationism, Donald Prothero, book review

I was in love with dinosaurs when I was a kid, and I still am. It was my love for dinosaurs and fossils and especially my time spent learning the minutea of the evolutionary history of horses that quickly brought me into direct conflict with the church that I was being inculcated into when I was very young and innocent. Subsequently, I had to learn about evolution in small niblets on the sly. But I wish I had been able to read paleontologist Don Prothero's beautifully written and lavishly illustrated book, Evolution: What The Fossils Say And Why it Matters (NYC: Columbia University Press; 2007). More than just a lucid overview of the fossil record, this book magnificently accomplishes its two primary objectives by showing how the "hard data" of the incredibly rich fossil record supports evolution, while also pointing out how pervasive creationist lies, misquotations and various deceptions actually are.

This robust clothbound volume comprises 381 pages printed on heavy, glossy paper. Each of the 16 chapters and its subsections begins with a quotation from an evolutionary scientist, various thinkers or from the Bible, and each chapter ends with a fairly extensive list of books and original papers that the author recommends for further reading. The book also includes a 10-page bibliography and an 8-page user-friendly index.

Prothero's book is divided into two parts. The first section serves as an introduction to the basic concepts that underpin the themes explored in the remainder of the book. The author compares science to various belief systems; discussing what science is (and is not), pointing out the differences between the scientific and religious/mainstream use of the word "theory", identifying scientists' goals, and describing how to detect pseudoscientific claims ("baloney detection"). Prothero also devotes an entire chapter to a fascinating historical discussion of the evolution of religion itself where he presents his own knowledge of the Bible gleaned from his in-depth readings of ancient biblical texts in their original languages. Even though I had a strongly biblical childhood, I still found this chapter to be quite illuminating.

Prothero then introduces his reader to fossils by describing the "lucky accidents" that fossils actually are since fossilization is a very rare event. He also presents a wonderfully persuasive and lavishly illustrated discussion of the superpositional order of rock strata and the associated fossils documented from a number of deep canyons in North America, particularly the Grand Canyon.

In "The Evolution of Evolution", the author reviews how evolutionary thought has changed since the time of the ancient Greeks through Darwin, from the Neo-Darwinian synthesis (which combines population genetics with paleontology, biogeography, ecology and systematics), to punctuated equilibrium and he even ventures out of his field of expertise into a brief discussion of "evo/devo"; evolutionary development. In a particularly well-written chapter, Prothero describes how cladistics has revolutionized our understanding of systematics and taxonomy;

Some aspects of cladistic theory have proven more difficult for many scientists to accept. For example, a cladogram is simply a branching diagram of relationships between three or more taxa. It does not specify whether one taxon is ancestral to another; it only shows the topology of their relationships as established by shared derived characters. In its simplicity and lack of additional assumptions, it is beautifully testable and falsifiable, so meets Popper's criterion for a valid scientific hypothesis. The nodes are simply branching points supported by shared derived characters, which presumably represent the most recent hypothetical common ancestor of the taxa that branch from that node. But strictly speaking, cladograms never put real taxa at any nodes, but only at the tips of branches. [Prothero, pp. 133-134].

The author shows that evolution is shaped like a bush, with many lineages branching off from one another and where "ancestors" live alongside their evolutionary descendants, instead of the more traditional view of an "evolutionary ladder", where ascending this ladder from "lower" species represents evolution into ever more perfect forms, with humans at the top with the gods above them. This "ladder" view also erroneously implies that evolution has directionality when in fact, it does not.

The second part of this book, entitled "Evolution? The fossils say YES!", is a direct response to creationist Duane Gish's fibdamentalist book, Evolution, the Fossils Say No! This section, which comprises more than half of the total book, provides a chapter-by-chapter analysis of the vast smorgasbord of transitional fossils that are known for nearly every major group of animals (plants are not even mentioned in this book). These chapters are jam-packed with information, each representing at least several lifetimes of dedicated research.

After establishing that amino acids and other complex organic compounds could have arisen de novo under the conditions present on a newly-formed Earth, Prothero then gallops quickly through the evolutionary histories of most major animal groups from microbes and other single-celled organisms, to simple multi-celled organisms, from a suite of invertebrate types to the vertebrates; the fishes, amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs and birds, and mammals. He focuses on specific transition fossils by describing several meticulously documented examples in snakes, whales, horses, giraffes and elephants, just to name a few. He even includes Tiktaalik! Ironically, since humans are not the apex of evolution, Prothero nonetheless includes a separate chapter that specifically focuses on primates, particularly human evolution.

The last chapter of the book is probably the most important: it vigorously argues that creationism is not only dangerous to American education but also to the continued survival of this country. Prothero notes that the rise of creationism in the late 1950s has led to the steadily increasing scientific illiteracy rate among Americans, which threatens this country's economic future because we are trying to compete with better educated countries in a vast global economy dominated by science and technology. He also shows how denying evolution is harmful to our health, as demonstrated by the sadly unsuccessful 1984 baboon-to human heart transplant by a surgeon who was a devout creationist.

The book features many diagrams and photographs that compliment its discussions. Many of the illustrations were done by my friend, superb paleo-wildlife artist Carl Buell. To give you an idea of the quality of the illustrations in this book, I want to draw your attention to several pictures are especially good examples of Buell's prodigious skills: the first is Color Plate 10 (in the middle of the book), which depicts the Eocene whale, Ambulosetus natans, discovered in Pakistan. This color painting is shown alongside a photograph of the fossils from which the drawing was made. But instead of portraying this animal as a static figure, Buell portrays the nascent whale leaping out of the water to grab another Eocene mammal in its large, toothy mouth (I guess that unfortunate mammal is an early horse). Another absolutely gorgeous example of Buell's artistic abilities is the truly remarkable black and white drawing of how life looked on earth for the first 3 billion years of its history [figure 7.1; p. 160]. I could go on and on praising Buell's artwork.

Since this is such an excellent book, I was surprised to find several mistakes in one paragraph about birds;

[...] The common European house sparrow is found all over North America today, but it is an invader, brought from Europe in 1852. The initial populations escaped and quickly spread all over North America from the northern boreal forests of Canada down to Costa Rica. We know that the ancestral population was all very similar because they were introduced from a few escaped immigrants. [...] House sparrows from the north are darker in color than their southern cousins, perhaps because dark colors help absorb sunlight and light colors are better at reflecting it in warm climates. Many other changes in wing length, bill shape, and other features have been documented. These differences are so extreme that bird watchers in the south cannot tell that they are looking at the same species as bird watchers in the north. [Prothero, p. 115]

There are two errors in this paragraph. First, English house sparrows didn't escape, they were brought to North America specifically to be released here, and released they were -- twice -- in Central Park. Second, even though English house sparrows potentially represent a wonderful example of "backyard evolution" that is obvious to everyone, this is most certainly not the case. While I am not questioning that there are measurable morphological differences in this species based on their geographical location, these differences are so minor that this species basically looks the same everywhere they are found, especially to the casual observer.

Unfortunately, despite the book's high production quality, I did run across a fair number of typographical and semantic errors -- most of which could have been caught by a spell-checker alone, although a good editor should have done a better job of it. I expect these errors will be addressed in future print runs. However, these flaws should not distract the reader from the overall strength of this well-argued book.

This book is intended for interested readers without a specialized scientific background, students of science and for those who wish to become better acquainted with the extensive fossil record for animals and how it refutes creationist lies. I highly recommend this book to school and public libraries and to anyone who is interested in gaining a deeper understanding of and appreciation for the fossil record and how it provides a powerful argument in support of evolution.

Donald R. Prothero is a geologist at Occidental College in Los Angeles and a lecturer of Geobiology at California Istitute of Technology in Pasadena. A fellow of the Geological Society of America, the Paleontological Society, and the Linnaean Society of London, Prothero is on the editorial board of Skeptic magazine and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Science Foundation. In 1991, he received the Schuchert Award for outstanding paleontologist under the age of 40. He is the author, coauthor, editor, or coeditor of 22 books and over 200 scientific papers.

Carl Buell is one of the most sought after paleo-wildlife artists in the world. Buell has a passionate fascination for animals, both living and extinct, although he specializes in animals that lived in the last 65 million years (after the disappearance of the dinosaurs). His robust, colorful illustration style uses texture and color relationships that provide a sense of physical presence to his animals. He works in both traditional media and digital painting, primarily using Photoshop for the latter. His pieces have appeared in a variety of nature magazines and science books.